Question

I have a program in which the user enters a username and a date and then clicks a button which inputs the data into a database.

The problem I am having is that I cannot seem to pass the text box date data as an argument in a method to my BOL class. I get the following error: “Member ‘P90XPRogramt.ProgramLoginBOL.TestParsing(string)’ cannot be accessed with an instance reference; qualify it with a type name instead”

Here is the code from my UI layer:

public partial class ProgramLoginForm : Form
{
    private ProgramLoginBOL busObject =
        new ProgramLoginBOL();       

    //default constructor
    public ProgramLoginForm(string dayNo)
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        busObject.InitializeConnection();
    } 

    private void btnBeginProgram_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        busObject.UserName = txtEnterName.Text;            

        busObject.TestParsing(txtStartDate.Text);            

    }

    //event handler to close program
    private void btnExitProgram_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Application.Exit();
    }        
}

Here is the code for my BOL class:

class ProgramLoginBOL
{
    //declare variables
    string userName = "";

    //instantiate a connecttion object to Access database
    OleDbConnection aConnection =
        new OleDbConnection(
            "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;" +
            "Data Source=P90XDatabase.accdb;");

    public ProgramLoginBOL()
    {
    }

    //property for userName variable
    public string UserName
    {
        get { return userName; }
        set { userName = value; }
    }

    public static DateTime TestParsing(string datetext)
    {
        DateTime dt;

        if (DateTime.TryParseExact(datetext, "d", null, 0, out dt))
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Parsed to {0}", dt);
        }
        else
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Bad date");
        }
        return dt;
    }

    public void InitializeConnection()
    {
        ProgramLoginDAL.InitializeConnection(aConnection);
    }
}

I’m not sure what it is telling me to do. By type name I assume they mean data type, so I tried the following:

string busObject.TestParsing(txtStartDate.Text);

string.busObject.TestParsing(txtStartDate.Text);

string.TestParsing(txtStartDate.Text);

busObject.TestParsing(string txtStartDate.Text);

None of these have worked. I also tried using DateTime instead of string. As I said, I’m at a loss as to what it wants me to do.

Answer 1

Static methods can’t be called with instances of a class exactly as error message says.

P90XPRogramt.ProgramLoginBOL.TestParsing(txtStartDate.Text);

For future errors try searching for error code first – normally MSDN article contains explanation and sample, like in this case CS0176